Comment Global block? (Score 1) 81
I guess I have a hard time understanding why these things are so hard to block (globally). Doesn't Twitter maintain some sort of global regex cookbook of spam-laden crap?
Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting:
"If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."
Comment IRC (Score 5, Interesting) 458
Their ad brings even more negative attention to poor ol' IRC...
Comment Re:FireGPG (Score 1) 439
If a letter and a postcard are dropped on the floor, which is easier to inadvertently read?
Also, look at the matter of detection. The letter is at least sealed in an envelope. You can generally detect if someone has opened the envelope...
Your postcard (unencrypted email)'s contents are not protected in transit. Your letter has a PGP/GPG envelope protecting it from being read, inadvertently or otherwise.
Also, look at the matter of detection. The letter is at least sealed in an envelope. You can generally detect if someone has opened the envelope...
Your postcard (unencrypted email)'s contents are not protected in transit. Your letter has a PGP/GPG envelope protecting it from being read, inadvertently or otherwise.
Comment Pardon my ignorance (Score 1) 321
But couldn't this still have the potential to pork your system and force a reboot? Wonder what their policy is on that...
Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Comment Re:I will laugh when ATT's network collapses (Score 0, Redundant) 501
And what about people sending texts as a passenger in the vehicle going faster than 10 MPH?
Comment Protected updates (Score 1) 170
Further proof as to why people should protect theirs: to prevent news agencies from analyzing them
Submission + - P2P growth leads IETF to debate "fair" ban (arstechnica.com)
Bannerman writes: At the Internet Engineering Task Force annual meeting in Vancouver this week, one of the topics discussed is fairness in bandwidth use A draft paper presented by a British Telecom network engineer talks about how to allocate bandwidth fairly between interactive and unattended (e.g., BitTorrent) applications. 'Briscoe argues that fairness goes out the window with P2P applications such as BitTorrent. These applications may use as many as 40 to 100 TCP sessions at the same time, while a browser uses two to four... with 80 interactive users and 20 unattended users behind a 10Mbps connection, the interactive users would get 7.1MB per day and the unattended users 3.6GB. Peak use for interactive users is 10Kbps, with an average of 1Kbps. For unattended peer-to-peer users, peak and average are both 500Kbps.' The result is that ISPs have less incentive to upgrade their networks.
Submission + - Microsoft suggests IE more secure than Firefox (computerworld.com)
Ian Lamont writes: "Microsoft and Mozilla are fighting over whose browser is more secure. In a report released last Friday, Jeff Jones, the strategy director in Microsoft's security technology unit, says that IE has had half as many vulnerabilities as Firefox in the last three years. Mozilla's response, delivered in a blog post by Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief evangelist, not only noted that Firefox bugs are fixed more quickly, but also said Jones' analysis was flawed: 'Even if the scales were the same, and we were living in a parallel universe in which Microsoft even approached Mozilla's standards of transparency and disclosure, the logic is just baffling: Jeff is saying that Mozilla's products are less secure than Microsoft's because Mozilla fixed more bugs. By that measure, IE4 is even more secure, because there were no security bugs fixed in that time frame; bravo to Microsoft for that!'"
Submission + - WGA: Won't Go Away anytime soon (itwire.com)
WirePosted writes: "Microsoft might be 'softening' Vista SP1's WGA anti-piracy procedures but they're actually very similar to what's been happening with XP for some time now, stopping most casual copying of retail discs and enabling detection of activation exploits used with pirate copies, in what is Microsoft's most successful attempt at reducing casual piracy of the OS at the consumer level yet."
Submission + - Could we live without open source?
An anonymous reader writes: Of the 118,023,363 sites surveyed by NetCraft so far in the month of May, just over 70 million of them wouldn't work if open source software were to disappear. A Day Without Open Source gives several examples of what would break [and pokes fun at MSN]. However, this got me to thinking. The real question should be: Could we live without open source? All of the proprietary companies that bitch about open source should read this and think about how stupid some of the statements they make are.
Submission + - CIRA Trashes ICANN Over Public Consultation
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the dot-ca
domain, has issued a rare public
rebuke of ICANN, the Internet governance agency. Just days
after ICANN issued a public
consultation on its performance, CIRA responded by stating that "due
to the poor design and implementation of this Request for Public
Comments we, as most serious stakeholders should, see few — if any — advantages to contributing to this effort which cannot produce any
usable results while potentially further alienating constituents."
Submission + - Which is better, job title or experience?
An anonymous reader writes: I am a developer with less than 2 years experience. Due to being at the right place at the right time I am the only developer for a start up that is getting bought by a multi-million dollar established company (we plan on hiring at least one more person to work under me soon). My current boss will become a VP/COO and his boss will be the owner of the company. I am well respected at my current company, but feel as if I am missing out on some good experience by not working with other developers. A friend of mine has recently contacted me about a job at the company he works at that is all developers (they do contract work) and wants me to interview there. Assuming money is not the issue which is better experience, being the lead software developer of a very small team, or being one of many developers?
Submission + - Proprietary software is from dark ages
An anonymous reader writes: Krish makes this comparison between proprietary software and dark ages where Kings ruled over the countries. He then goes on to argue that open source software is like a mature democracy of the modern world. An interesting take.
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